Patrick Woodroffe, the genius behind the Olympic lighting displays, shows us his top five books

Remember the Olympic opening ceremony and how the lights kind of stole the show? Well, the man responsible for those billions of LED’s that brought tears to the eyes of 27million people was Patrick Woodroffe, a lighting designer who loves a good thriller. In his 30 year career Patrick has designed show-stopping displays for The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, 10cc, Depeche Mode, and – intriguingly – “existing monarchs, hip-hop performers and desert sheiks.” He divides his time between a house in Bath and a boat in London – making sure he has his prized books, some even doubles, at both locations.

Without further ado, here are Patrick’s most treasured publications, accompanied by a rather gripping commentary…

The 9/11 Commission Report

After the immediate horror of 9/11 had passed, and like many others I suspect, I became fascinated in how such an extraordinary operation could have been put together by the terrorists, how the authorities responded, and what really happened on that day. The report is well written and reads like a thriller, cleverly leaving the technical detail to a very thorough appendix of which half the book consists. This allows for a vivid sense of the real-time unfolding of the events as they happened, all told verbatim by the people who took part – from air traffic controllers, policemen and fireman, to passengers and all the other characters who were bit players in the tragedy. The book is a fast and furious journey from the early morning of September11 to the days and weeks afterwards, with actual dialogue and detail taken from the many hundreds of depositions and eye witness reports that were collected by the commission. Fascinating and enlightening and also deeply sad.The 9/11 Commission Report

John le Carré Compendium – John le Carré

I have all the le Carré novels in my library at home in Bath and then a select few doubles here on the boat. They never disappoint and somehow on re-reading you cannot quite remember what comes next and the surprises still surprise me. Every character is beautifully drawn and in the early books especially, a grey pallor suffuses all the word pictures that le Carré paints for us. He’s some sort of genius.www.johnlecarre.com

Narrow Dog To Carcassonne – Terry Darlington

As a boaty, I sometimes fantasise about giving it all up and heading off down a gentle flowing river or canal without a care in the world. For the moment though Terry Darlington does it for me in this thoughtful, original and laugh-out-loud record of a trip to France on his narrow boat, with his whippet Jim and his long-suffering wife Monica. I really might do it myself one day. I will, I will….Terry Darlington: Narrow Dog To Carcassonne

The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer

The reading of this heavy volume passed in a moment for me. It is the extraordinary and chilling story of the life and death of Gary Gilmour, and his long journey from a damaged childhood through prison cells and courtrooms to a squalid ending in a brightly-lit prison store-room where a firing squad took retribution for his crime some years later. It’s a tale of the tawdry sadness of small lives but is also as wide as the clear Utah skies under which a lot of the story is set. Above all it is a story of America and Americans told by one of their great authors.Norman Mailer: The Executioner’s Song

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones – Stanley Booth

I’ve worked for the Stones for over 25 years, so there is an obvious fascination at seeing them in this earlier part of their career. This record of the famous 1976 tour of the Americas takes place during a very different period and is very different experience of my time with the band. Then it was different, and how! This record by Stanley Booth, a young Californian music journalist, is full of the drugs, violence, Machiavellian dealings and intrigue that surrounded the group then. As an insider it’s interesting see the view painted by an outsider, but what is most fascinating is to see how the character of the main protagonists and their relationship with each other has changed little throughout the years, although their behaviour has.Stanley Booth: The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (Canons)

London-based designer and art director Shaz Madani is the woman responsible for Riposte magazine’s fresh aesthetic. The mag is now on its seventh issue, and Shaz also manages to balance a plethora of other design projects while creating the mag. Most recently these include Giles Duley’s photobook One Second of Light, the MoMA-published tome Design and Violence and an album design for Rival Consoles.

Edwin Pickstone has been a tutor and technician at The Glasgow School of Art for over ten years, starting out as an artist in residence at the school in 2005. The job sees him care for the university’s precious collection of letterpress printing equipment, a dream job for many. Edwin’s own work sits comfortably within the academic, artistic and design worlds, where he often uses letterpress equipment to demonstrate his passion for typography, graphic design, print and books.

Editor in chief of The Happy ReaderSeb Emina, describes the publication as “the first general interest magazine for the avid reader”. It has gained a varied and faithful following and each issue of the quarterly consistently sells out each time its published. The Happy Reader grew out of a conversation between Penguin Books and Fantastic Man founders Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers about how their way of making magazines could be applied to classic literature. Seb joined the title at the beginning in 2014, and has since taken this simple but complicated magazine and made it into a literary publication like no other.

Sarah Hyndman is a graphic designer, author, researcher and the founder of Type Tasting, an experimental type studio delivering talks, workshops and events. Sarah researches and teaches about the psychology of type and how to use it to communicate more effectively. She runs workshops, gives talks and creates events such as Wine and Type Tastings, which pose the question: “Do you judge a wine by its label?” Sarah is also the author of Why Fonts Matter, which we published an extract from earlier this year that discussed the effects of typography on our emotions. She is just on the cusp of publishing a second book, How to Draw Type and Influence People, which will be published by Laurence King in spring 2017.

As both a practitioner and tutor of graphic design, Fraser Muggeridge has numerous projects under his belt that often try to place graphic design in a new context or stretch its capabilities, whether that’s through identities, exhibitions, catalogues or posters. Fraser is the founder of his namesake studio based in London, working with fellow designers Luke Hall, Jules Estèves, Rachel Treliving, Elena Papassissa and Samuel White. The designer also runs Typography Summer School in both London and New York, which provides a space for design graduates to learn more about typography.

Deyan Sudjic has been director of the Design Museum since 2006 and is a prolific writer about design and architecture. In between co-founding Blueprint magazine in 1983 with Peter Murray and working as the architecture critic for The Observer since 2000, he has written numerous books on architecture. His latest tome, The Language of Cities, tries to define the 21st Century city by looking at the differences between capital cities and the rest, in a bid to understand how people identify with these metropolises. With a love of spaces and enduring design, we were eager to find out what gems are lurking on Deyan’s bookshelf. A savvy architecture-heavy selection, he takes us on a journey from the buildings of London to Latin America and its initial utopian plans. h3. Ian Nairn: Nairn’s London